Meteoric Musings
by ceramicSquid
Summary: Rose contemplates resources and existence in the Furthest Ring. Acknowledges all canon to 9/30/12, oneshot, all ships canon.


Darkness

How can you have a deafening silence, a silence that everyone hears?

How can you make an audible silence, when silence won't enter the ears?

How is a night filled with the lack of light; what is the speed of its dark?

How can an owl, in the deep of the night, sing, surpassing the songs of a lark?

How can a mystery be all but known; where is a whodunit's why?

How is the sky of a midnight moon black, when it shows indigo to the eye?

How can a darkness, so futile to fathom, be written by a wordsmith's pen?

And where is the light of the hope in the night, saving bleak stories time and again?

* * *

Where is the light indeed? Where does the darkness stand? And where am I?

These questions are echoed through time and space, through infinite universes, fruitful, null, and void.

Why should our own universe differ?

Why indeed?, thought Rose, carefully replacing the book on its shelf. There had been many volumes, stars in a sky of knowledge. But not all of them were the dry children's histories of the future as shown by a cloud. Some of them were the dim, white dwarfs that showed a true glimpse of the Game and its various iterations through the multiverse. Though most were the most concise technical aspects of Skaia, directly pertaining to the ectobiology process, some were intricate, overwrought poetry such as she herself might write. The collection of volumes was sparse yet varied, a veritable cornucopia of golden knowledge, intermixed with complete horseshit for optimal effect.

But even horseshit has its shine, its allure. The movies John liked would never have been famous, otherwise. Many of the volumes were Dersian treatises on the morality involved in the war. There were no written volumes denouncing Derse, as this was the memory of a Dersite station, but several questioned the authority of the Queens.

The game had presented the sides as the simplest dichotomous divide: good and evil, light and dark, Prospit and Derse. This was hard for Rose to grasp; did it mean that half of all players were evil, and sided with the wrong, or that they were doomed to betray their dreamself's home in the hopes of creating a new universe?

The books inside the game, however, told a different tale. Neither Prospit nor Derse was evil, because a chunk of rock floating in the sky has no concept of morality. The average carapacian lived in a moral gray area, caring most for their livelihood; patriotism to their country was a far-off second. The soldiers were drafted or cloned rather than electing to join the army. Most carapacians in the war were not even soldiers. The vast majority were those seeking their fortune away from Prospit and Derse, tilling the new ground of the Medium in the hopes of building a new life.

The royalty were a different story. While a Warweary Villein might be forced to join the battle, the kings willfully and eagerly joined the fray, using their scepters' prototypings to advance their side's cause. The queens manipulated the entire affair, ensuring that a queen as a boss would be deadly. The rings of the queens provided prototypings, but only in the most dire of cases did the Black King die before his mate.

Only the queens and their advisers planned for and encouraged the war wholeheartedly. Only a few ill-positioned warmongers could cause all the damage in Skaia.

The ranks, however seemed to be immaterial. In all iterations of the game that could be studied, no one, whether a Knight or a Queen, was any more that a pawn of their universe's reproductive urges.

Once, she would have lashed out at the futility. Not so long ago, the Land of Light and Rain had experienced such a rage.

But there was no such futile anger left. There was only the joy of exploring the dream bubbles, of seeing trolls that had only been semi-coherent rantings turn into full formed people. There was also the shock of meeting the ancestors.

The journey had initially been thought to be a long, dull term during which there was nothing to do but mourn the dead. The dream bubbles brought light and adventure. In addition, everyone found something to do with their time. Dave in particular seemed to enjoy tampering with the fabric of memory; his e-bubbles soaked up much of his spare time, though as the Knight, he could always find more. Rose was kept occupied by musings and a particular jade-blooded troll with an eye for a certain type of (trashy paranormal romance) novel.

But occupied though everyone was, the three years would soon be over, and although the Beforan princess did have an plot with her potential team, there was work to be done. Though the war was supposedly ended for three out of four of the sessions, Rose knew that the trans-universal battle had not yet truly begun. The war cry had beamed throughout the multiverse in polychromatic horror, and the comfortable fiction of the dream bubbles, usable as they had been, could not be a refuge forever. The children had a heavy load of war to bear, and losses had been suffered even before the first meeting. Though Rose usually would have taken the time to analyze the situation, even with time God Tiers on their side, there would be neither the time nor the need to meditate or calculate luck.

There would only be war.


End file.
